Why I Love a Dinner Party

One of my FAVOURITE things about living in halls is having most of my best friends living within two minutes of me, it’s absolutely lovely and I like to abuse their proximity as much as possible… hence I love cooking for my friends!

The best thing we’ve ever done was a roast dinner. It was delicious and it’s DEFINITELY possible in a student kitchen if you follow these steps:

Find ten people to invite over for dinner. This is necessary as it cuts the cost of the whole roast down to about £2.50 per person, which is not expensive when everyone chips in.

Assign a head chef. This may be my controlling tendencies talking but I think that when you have so many people cooking, you need someone to oversee the operation and sort out timings for everything. And also shout at the boys when they insist on taking an incredibly long time to lovingly prepare a chicken, it’s two o’ clock and it still needs to cook for almost two hours. Which brings me to…

Shop in advance. We made a mistake by going shopping at about one o’ clock and not starting the cooking until two in the afternoon meaning we didn’t eat until four thirty by which time everyone was starting to fade away… (have snacks for the cooking process)

Get disposable cups and plates and ask people to bring cutlery. No one ever has enough cutlery or crockery to sufficiently feed so many people, so ask everyone to bring a knife and fork. I’ve found it’s useful to keep paper plates and cups in the cupboard as well, they’ll always come in useful at some point.

Get a production line going. Some people peeling, some people chopping, some people making sure potatoes don’t burn, some people making sure no one has expired from hunger because there is still an hour left to go before everything is cooked.

Clean the common room. Ok if you live in a hall where you have a decent sized kitchen this will not be a problem but chez Fisher, if you’re having more than like four people over, you move the party to the common room. I sent someone down there with a wet sponge to remove the worst of the sticky alcohol stains from the table.

Appoint one person to hold the door. We had to carry the food down two floors to the common room which was certainly interesting…